Would you keep a Tiger as a pet? As we all know, humans tend to follow their instincts, and as a social being, one of them is to have company, sometimes that company comes as animals. But humans are sometimes hostile, and some of us feel the urge to harm, and that harm is sometimes directed towards animals. With greedy people wanting a particular animal as a pet, poaching becomes a regular practice and species start decreasing in number.
Some people may not be aware of this issue, but it’s a harsh reality all over the world. This is an important problem and we should start doing something about it. Because humans are the more conscious being, but not the most important for the ecosystem, indisputably animals and plants are.
One big problem
Keeping exotic animals as pets has become a trend all over the globe,Instagram stories and Facebook videos showing animal caretakers doing their job, we romanticize the idea of having one of those animals with us.
This could perhaps be the reason the black market of unusual animals is growing. That’s the case of the traffic of otters in Southeast Asia, it’s increasing so much that some people are willing to pay more than a thousand dollars for just one of them. Otters are adorable, we all know that, but they are a wild animal, when in their natural habitat they hunt fish and crustaceans, they don’t play with toys and Teddy bears. Otters still don’t have the classification of endangered species, but they’re certainly getting there, and their numbers keep decreasing with each passing day.
Social media and their impact
It is necessary to emphasize the influence that social media has nowadays, thanks to Youtube, Facebook and Instagram, the commerce of otters increased exponentially, some of them are even being sold via Facebook. Almost every country in Southeast Asia has banned all otter trade but people still market this poor animals.
Otters are just one of the species that is affected but there’s a lot more, some kinds of turtles, monkeys, even tigers. Humans sometimes don’t realize what effect we can have on our own planet. We need to stop following this ‘influencers’, we can admire this magnificent animals but we shouldn’t keep them from living freely in the wild on account of our vanity. We still have a lot to learn about compassion.
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